Whether you're at a digital agency, a consulting or accounting firm (or any service-based business really) - projects are at the heart of the work you do. As your business continues to grow, so does your need to increase company-wide transparency when it comes to project workflows and business processes. Having complete visibility in these areas could help prevent bigger project failures, a loss of clients, or a loss of revenue (or even prevent business failure). To help you get a clear view of what's going on in your business, here are four tactics for fostering company-wide transparency.
Despite good intentions from every employee, people make mistakes - one of them being tracking time accurately. This is especially true for teams that have no way of doing it automatically, the reason being that it’s easy to forget when they did what at the end of a long week. Luckily, with a business automation platform, time tracking is done automatically (even when emailing). This makes it easy for your team to continually deliver their work without having to figure out how much time it took them. Then, at the end of the week, everyone can see everything they did and where their time was spent (without having backtrack manually). Point blank: automating this process is your best bet at getting rid of this commonly made mistake and fostering greater transparency.
You know when you're juggling several projects and you accidentally forget to inform one of your clients of the status of their project, or you forget to send the weekly report to the executive team? If your client had their own portal, they'd easily be able to track the progress of their projects (eliminating the need for constant updates). Also, if your executive team had their own dashboard, they'd easily be able to pull the reports they need and track all projects - just by logging in. With the right business automation platform, your clients would have access to a client portal, and your executive team could log in and see the status of every project in the pipeline. With that kind of complete visibility, owners and managers of any small-to medium-sized business could effectively track the progress of all projects. Instead of having to find the time to speak to employees involved in various projects, an owner or manager could simply check on the status of the project with their smart technology. No more waiting to speak to employees about whether or not a project is on schedule - you'd be able to check it out for yourself when you need to.
When business processes aren’t clear or accessible, it’s easy to lose track of who's responsible for what tasks (and who should be held accountable when mistakes happen). If you don’t have a way of tracking communication or project tasks, how do you hold the right people accountable for unfinished work? With a business automation platform, business processes are automated - making it easy for project managers to guarantee employee accountability. Not only that, but a business automation solution also opens the door to clear and transparent processes so that everyone can be aware of project statuses. The best part? Having that ensures employee accountability and fosters client trust (which is so crucial to any client-facing business). A transparent process gives everyone visibility into company-wide protocols and ensures complete accountability for all actions and tasks.
You just won over a new contract and now you have to pick the best people for the project - awesome! But... there's a problem. You don't have visibility into all of the skills your staff can bring and you don’t know what their schedule looks like. As a project manager, you need a business automation platform so that you can easily access everyone's schedule and identify the best skills for the tasks. Instead of emailing five people to try and find a good fit, it would allow project managers and employees to look for specific employees trained in the skills they need to assign tasks to them or to ask them for assistance. This makes it so that people do not waste time emailing the wrong department and any issues with projects or clients can be handled right away.
In the end, the right solution is not too far away. A business automation platform can help you transform your business by giving you and your clients the visibility you need for your projects to be successful. You can easily eliminate unnecessary time-tracking mistakes, give your client and executive team access to track all projects and have access to scheduling the right people for the right tasks at the right time.
Check out how a company just like yours solved this issue and cut their costs by 30%.
